Unity

Unity has a rarely used feature known as Scriptable Objects. These are essentially very light weight components, allowing one to edit them in the editor, set pre-defined states, and place them in components as required. Instead of inheriting from MonoBehavior, inherit from ScriptableObjects. ScriptableObjects do not have all of the same states that Monobehaviors do, they can be validated, but do not have the Update/Start/Etc methods required by MonoBehavior. Materials are actually Scriptable Objects, along with several other components in the Unity Architecture. One of the simplest uses of Scriptable Objects is that of a shared state. Let’s say that you have a score that many different objects need to know in the game. There are basically 3 ways that you can do that: use a static object or Singleton, use a single component that keeps the state, or use scriptable objects. Static Interfaces are not well supported in Unity. If one changes the code, Unity cannot hot swap the state. They can change the entire system, but it can sometimes be unclear what in the system can change things. The also suffer from a difficulty in testing individual components. For instance, what happens if you have a score board, […]

For the last few months, I have been fascinated with Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster that he launched in to space. I was fascinated so much I even created a website, http://www.whereisroadster.com, which tracks said roadster in it’s travels through space. I watched the video that SpaceX released showing video of the car traveling in Earth orbit for several hours. In that process, I decided that I wanted to make a simulation of what the Roadster would look like, and in the end I decided I wanted to make a screen saver that would show where the Tesla Roadster is in space at any one time, and show it to the user. In the end, I developed a simulation in Unity that looks something like this: This simulation captured my attention, but I wanted to figure out how to make it in to a screen saver. In the end I ended up releasing this to the Unity Asset Store, but I wanted to give you at least the basics of what is required. The first thing is that your application must be able to run completely on it’s own. This means no inputs, setting up the screen resolution, etc. Secondly, add […]

Ever wondered how to get your game to rank? Complete Unity Developer student, Rafael, shares his experience of taking his first game from nowhere to third in the Google Play store listing (for the term “ragdoll physics”). Rafael’s Story My name is Rafael Rivera, I’m a 38 year old advertisement bachelor from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and I’m an Indie Game developer. Since I can remember, I was always playing video games. I’m the type of gamer that enjoys every kind of game – from 8-bits to flash games, mobile, Xbox or PC. If it’s fun then I will play it! I always wanted to work with games, but it was not an easy option back then… before the internet. Yeah, I’m from that time. Since I decided to start my Gamedev journey with Unity, about eight months ago, I searched online for courses and found Udemy. I clicked on their ‘best-rated Unity courses’ and found “Complete Unity Developer – Learn To Code By Making Games” with instructor Ben Tristem and team. I learnt everything I needed for my first game: animations, level managers, buttons, sounds, physics, coding in C# and more. Ben Tristem is a great teacher. The course made […]

How do AAA games make their worlds feel alive and interesting, even if all the player is doing is walking down the street? They consider their worlds as living entities, not just static backdrops. One way they do this is by using movement within their game world to tell a story. Let’s look at a simple, specific example… Here is a game scene from our RPG that we’ve been developing. The player is progressing along their path, heading towards the next steps of the quest we’ve created for them. In our game, like most RPGs, we’re using combat as a primary system of challenge and interest… but of course we don’t want to have one, long, continuous combat sequence. In this instance, what are our options for communicating story to the player? Well, we can have the player bump into an NPC and deliver some dialogue. That is usually the most to-the-point way of getting story across. For example: Crazy Bill: Quick, the town is under attack, the villagers need help. Player: Rightio Bill, I’ll get right on that. Or we can pop up a dialogue box on the screen saying something to the effect of: “The town is […]

How frustrating Unity isn’t starting and telling you “Sorry, this link is no longer valid”? Not a helpful error either! This confused me the other day as Unity had been working flawlessly previously. To make matters worse restarting the computer appeared to fix it, but just once and then it started again. So what is going on here? Well I had just installed Unity 2018 beta, and thought, oh well is must be a beta issue, but then Unity 2017 started doing it as well. The only thing that had changed as far as I was aware is that I wasn’t at home, and link no longer valid didn’t make much sense yet alluded to a issue with the internet. A quick peek at my firewall settings revealed that the Unity program is blocked when on a public network But I’m not on a public network, ah Windows! So to sort this out we are going to have to change the network type. There is more than one way to do this, but here’s how I went about it. Click on the start button and click the settings button Next Select Network and Internet After that you’ll need to select […]

A place for everything, everything in its place. Benjamin Franklin That’s why we care about this technique, because otherwise without it we duplicate things in Unity – a lot. Then… We lose track of our project. Bugs appear everywhere. Builds swell to device-breaking sizes. We go a little crazy. … and then die! OK, I may be exaggerating just a little here, but in my experience creating some of the world’s biggest and best online courses on Unity I get to see what my 100s of thousands of students do right – and wrong. The Premise NOT premises, like a building. And when a cloud provider offers you an “on-premise” solution then they’re dumb, they mean “on premises”. Man, who can use a dictionary these days! Anyway, I digress. When you sit at a computer typing, or using your mouse, think about how much value it’s even possible to create. If you type continually at am ambitious 80 words per minute, then you’re only creating about half a kilobyte per minute! You may create real value a little faster with the mouse, but I doubt it! So if you’re not recording video or audio, your project file shouldn’t be growing faster […]

Game ideas can come from the strangest of places! Here, Unity student Pontus, shares his game dev journey to finally finishing a game… What’s your background? I work for ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) as a VFX artist, an exciting job which has allowed me to work on some great films. So why would I make something as silly as Flappy Fart? Well, I remember picking up a software around the age of 10 I believe, called The Games Factory, where you could put together very simple 2D games. The idea that I could make something that others could then play was a thrilling thought! I started making games like a mad person, I had so many projects going on I lost count, I loved it! And I finished zero projects… And as the years went by I started forgetting about the video game making dreams and decided to pursue a career in film instead, I had some basic understanding of editing and 3D softwares, it seemed like the right thing to do. Besides, the idea of programming in games was always daunting. It was only one day at work, years later, when a friend of mine mentioned an online […]

It’s awesome to see our students taking what they’ve learnt on our courses and using it to help other people learn. In this post we’re sharing John Gale’s story of how he came to create ‘Hiragana Breaker’ – a block-breaking game that helps you learn basic Japanese characters. What’s your background? My major in university was for audio recording with a minor in music. I have a Master’s degree in Japanese, a Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) Level 1 certification, and lived in Japan as an English teacher for almost four year. All of that was because of Japanese video games like Final Fantasy and Mega Man on the original NES. So yes, I have been into video games since I was a child. But growing up in the 80’s and 90’s before the Internet and YouTube were everywhere, I never made the connection that computer programming or designing games was something I could learn to do. It seemed so distant and disconnected from anything I was studying or pursuing as a career. Looking back now though, it’s something I could have done, been good at and had a successful career with. But thanks to the course I realize it’s […]

A definite highlight for us is when you folks share your creations with us! In this post Unity student and Co-Founder of Ghost Street Games, Dante Campana, walks us through his game development journey. What’s your background? I began dipping my toes into game development at roughly the age of 12. The first time I found the Warcraft III Map Editor program, I stayed up all night making my first tower defense game to play with my friends on Battle.Net. By the time I was in high school, when I wasn’t playing Rockband or Crackdown, I found myself editing sprites for a small development team that, unfortunately, never released anything to the public. I put game development to the side for a period of time until I went to school for audio engineering which shifted my focus back towards game development and, more specifically, sound design and integration. I spent my first year out of school as a contractor for a AAA game studio in the quality assurance department and the moment my contract ended I knew my next task had to be picking up Unity. How did you end up on a Udemy course? Having just finished a stint […]

Hi, I’m Ben, author of Sam’s Teach Yourself Unity in 24h, and creator of some of the most successful online Unity courses on the internet. Unity 2017 was released in the summer of 2017, and (spoiler alert), it’s mainly a naming change. The interface remains the same, and there are no huge changes outside of Unity’s online offerings. Having said that there are some very exciting new features… 10. Ambisonic Audio Positioning sound in the horizontal plane is great, but in the real world sounds come from above and below too. That’s where ambisonic audio or “full sphere surround sound” comes in. 9. NVIDIA VRWorks In the spirit of immersion, Unity 2017 now support’s NVIDIA VRWorks. This improves the performance and quality of your VR games. 8. Asset Workflow Power-Ups Later we talk about improvements to collaboration tools. However, even if you’re working alone there are some great new tools to improve the way you bundle your assets, import your models and track dependencies. 7. Graphics Improvements With every version of Unity, the graphics are coming on leaps and bounds. Amongst other things, Unity 2017 has improvements in lightmapping and realtime shadows. The particle system has also had some attention, […]